Resolve and The Bursars Forum recently surveyed more than 1000 subscribers to our lists and the results had many interesting findings.
Survey participants came from a across the non profit sector, with the majority being from non-government schools.
One finding stood out from the survey – 92% of participants indicated that their organisation found it difficult to find new board members!
In our work with Boards around Australia and internationally we observe that finding new board members is a challenge, and encourage boards to be very deliberate about renewing their Boards with new membership.
Some boards are required to seek nominations from a company, church or association membership base and in years gone-by they received more nominations than available positions and therefore ran an election process. Today many of those same boards now need to directly approach potential nominees just to try and get enough people to comply with minimum board member numbers.
Boards also need to understand their role, make sure meetings are well run and members feel they are making a worthwhile contribution when giving their time to the organisation.
Boards need to make sure they have a good mix of experience, skills, age and gender. It is helpful to understand who will need to be replaced when and even have a “reserves list” of potential board members to draw on.